At a rehearsal recently, I was having trouble reading some music. This was due to the fact that the arranger had written some rhythms in a not-so-conventional manner. The notes were all there, however, there were bars on eighth notes where I usually don’t see them. E.g., in 4/4 there is common practice where it is easy to see beat three. This is called the imaginary bar line, and it is really helpful when sight reading. Regardless of the rhythms contained within beats one and two, beat three is usually shown as if it were at the beginning of the bar. What I saw at the rehearsal were barred eighth notes starting on the and of two going into and grouped with beat three. This is not common and made some fairly easy figures a bit hard to “see” and play correctly.
That being said, I took this as a challenge. Could I read these charts and decipher the rhythms? Well, sometimes I could and other times I fumbled a bit. I did end up “fixing” some of these so that when gig time comes, I don’t fall all over myself. It did get me to thinking that it may be time to go back to Louis Bellson’s “Modern Reading Text in 4/4.” One of the cool things about this book, is that it forces you to read some common rhythms written in a very uncommon way. Hmm… and just when I thought I could read music!
Add Comment